ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the roots in the social history of the military in Canada, especially as they might have affected the Militia at the beginning of the 1970s, and, of course, to set the data in a historical context. It deals with the metamorphosis of the Militia from Canada's main Army to a handmaiden of the eventually unified regular force. After some exhausting preliminary reading that could not possibly include every regimental history, it became evident that the importance of the Militia as a social and a military institution had declined sharply after the Korean War. Whatever might have been thought about the military competence of the nineteenth-century Militia, the British seem to have had enough confidence in it to trust it with the responsibility of home defense, though further conflict with the United States was not entirely improbable.
